Umm... so I CAN'T take the travel articles I wrote for the Wikipedia and paste them in here and say 'look I wrote this for you!'? I started writing travel stuff on Australia for the wikipedia, but I never got very far because I kept getting sidetracked. There's probably nothing I can't recreate anyway so it's not a big deal...

So basically, we can only put stuff in here if it comes straight out of our own heads? KJ 22:00, 5 Aug 2003 (PDT)

Yes, if you have copyright -- if you wrote the stuff -- then you can put it in Wikitravel. But you can't take an article you started on Wikipedia and which got edited by dozens of people and copy it directly to Wikitravel. I know that sucks, but see shared:Why Wikitravel isn't GFDL for deetz. -- Evan 22:05, 5 Aug 2003 (PDT)

I've transferred an article that I wrote from wikipedia on Kakadu National Park. I think the only contribution from other wikipedians was somebody closed a bracket. Are you saying that I cannot transfer my own work? Tiles 23:06, 5 Aug 2003 (PDT)

I just asked that. If you're SURE that nobody else has been fiddling around with your text then go ahead and import it. In my case I figure that it's probably as easy to rewrite from scratch because I know that my articles have been re-edited a few times by other people... Your article on Kakadu looks great! I hope you've got more like it! :) KJ

Yes, you can copy your own work. First, check the Page History to make sure that you're actually doing that. Second, put a note on the talk page to the effect that you copied it from Wikipedia. Lastly, remember that there's a difference between a travel journal and an encyclopedia. We need practical travel information, not encyclopedic content. We want articles people can print out and put in their back pocket. Please re-check our goals and non-goals; does the article you've already written meet them? If not, why bother copying it? -- Evan 07:35, 6 Aug 2003 (PDT)

Contents

I removed this statement about Wikitravel not being a Wikimedia project: The reason is explained here. The reasons, which are many, are not in fact explained there at all. --Evan 13:17, 25 May 2005 (EDT)

There's a report on Slashdot [1] that the FSF (in cooperation with Wikimedia and Creative Commons) is updating the GFDL to be compatible with the CC-By-SA license that Wikitravel uses. When this happens, and Wikipedia is relicensed under the new version of GFDL, that will mean that content from WP could be copied verbatim into WT. Not that we want lots of wholesale imports of this sort, but at least it might lighten the task of explaining to newbies that they Can't Do That when they copy-paste a bit of history or geography from WP into WT articles. - Todd VerBeek 18:52, 1 December 2007 (EST)

Here's Wikimedia's rather terse announcement. Great news if/when it happens, but I'm afraid we'll still be rapping newbies on the knuckles with rulers for some time... Jpatokal 11:38, 2 December 2007 (EST)

Regarding this edit [2], there has been some worry that our license upgrade could lead to lots of copy-paste jobs here from Wikipedia. I suggested at wts:Talk:License upgrade#Wikipedia moves to CC by-sa 3.0, We can use policy to prevent wholesale and detrimental copying of WP content to here. But I very often find a nice sentence to add to a listing or paragraph here, and it's a pain to have to rewrite it entirely.

I think that any significant quantities of copy-pasted text from WP would be very much detrimental to our project goals, as we're aiming to be something quite different from Wikipedia, with content that justifies reading our site, rather than WP! I'm fine with toning down my initial edit, but can we work out a new wording that would preserve patrollers' ability to revert big copy-paste jobs at their discretion? --PeterTalk 17:10, 4 January 2010 (EST)

I think the rewording that I did still covers that, but if you want to revise again, go for it. However, I don't see it as any different than someone that adds a big paragraph of original text that doesn't flow right or is not travel-oriented.... someone can and should come along after them and make it better, but at least more content is there than before. I'm planning to copy more chunks from their Machu Picchu article over to expand our history on our article, and after I do, I'll copyedit it and make it more agreeable to our goals – cacahuatetalk 17:16, 4 January 2010 (EST)

As an attempt to prevent misunderstandings reverted in [3] and [4], I've just attempted to describe a rule that we only create a region article when current breakdown is not detailed enough--rather than copy-pasting regions hierarchy from WP or official sources. Please fix/improve as appropriate: [5].